Lessons from the Fyre
with Marc Weinstein
We had the opportunity to speak with Marc Weinstein (entrepreneur, venture capitalist, start-up advisor, and Fyre’s music festival consultant) at 1880.
Here are 2 questions from the evening:
We’ve all been in situations where we feel like something is going down and we know we can say something about it but we didn’t. Was there that point for you?
A lot of the reflection I’ve been doing has been distilled to internal versus external. Intuition is often ignored and rationalised away for external desires. We often encounter situations where we trust someone more than we trust ourselves, and that was where I was at that time of my life. I was not feeling uber confident, I was on my second startup company which was teetering on the edge of failure, my first one had failed, so I really wanted a win. I ignored a lot of the signs. Had I been more grateful of what I had or more confident in myself I would have said something.
I met someone at Open Circles, her name is Erika Cheung. She was one of the whistleblowers for Theranos. This was a 23-year-old woman and when she first brought problems to the senior management she was dismissed and told that she was too young and inexperienced. Seven months in she voted with her feet — she quit; and took it a step further by writing a letter to the regulators. This woman is my hero, to have the fortitude to stand up and say this is not right and I’m going to do something about it.
Why has a fairly obscure failed endeavour caught the attention of the world? Why does anyone care about Fyre?
It comes down to the influencer culture and the toxic worship of the entrepreneur — the new hero in society who went from zero to one thousand. Those 2 combined and we have entered this perverse, outcome-driven American Dream or World Dream. Talk to me about real issues, not about a bunch of people on an island who didn’t get the experience they wanted.
Special thanks to Open Circles for this collaboration.
